THE GREENBOTTLES

Too Long; Didn't Read

I have wished for a few things in my life, none of them capable of interfering with the common weal. I have longed to possess a pond, screened from the indiscretion of the passers by, close to my house, with clumps of rushes and patches of duckweed. Here, in my leisure hours, in the shade of a willow, I should have meditated upon aquatic life, a primitive life, easier than our own, simpler in its affections and its brutalities. I should have watched the unalloyed happiness of the mollusk, the frolics of the Whirligig, the figure-skating of the Hydrometra [a water bug known as the Pond skater], the dives of the Dytiscus beetle, the veering and tacking of the Notonecta [the water boatman], who, lying on her back, rows with two long oars, while her short forelegs, folded against her chest, wait to grab the coming prey. I should have studied the eggs of the Planorbis, a glairy nebula wherein focuses of life are condensed even as suns are condensed in the nebulae of the heavens. I should have admired the nascent creature that turns, slowly turns in the orb of its egg and describes a volute, the draft, perhaps, of the future shell. No planet circles round its center of attraction with greater geometrical accuracy.